Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SFS (Situating Free Speech: European parrhesias in comparative perspective)
Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2022-02-28
To this crucial set of questions, anthropology, with its fine-grained ethnographic method and comparative heritage, is poised to make a substantive contribution. Building on these starting points, this project asked what free speech means in Europe through sustained ethnographic accounts of how these values are actually lived on the ground by practitioners, professionals and laypersons in times of crisis and political transformation: from the legal management of public speech in France after Charlie Hebdo, to newsmaking in troubled times in Ukraine; from disputes surrounding the memorialisation of fascism in Italy, to free speech as therapy in a UK mental health care setting. Beyond Europe, the project has acted as a hub for broader conversations amongst anthropologists, legal scholars, historians and philosophers around the topic of freedom of speech.
The project's participants have developed many detailed arguments and conclusions about the specific contexts they have worked in, reflected in a range of publications. Furthermore the project as a whole has led to a broader overall conclusion: the binary way in which public debates about freedom of speech are most often framed is limiting our ability to understand the diversity of people's engagements with speech freedoms. Public debates over freedom of speech tend to gravitate around a binary contrast between two poles: on the one hand freedom of speech as an individual, asocial or even antisocial right; on the other hand, constraints on speech as an adjustment of individuals to collectives (social responsibility, cultural sensitivity, etc.). In line with classic liberal political philosophy, arguments are thus cast either as calls for more freedom for individuals against collective censorship, or as calls for more careful and responsible uses of speech against individual selfishness or thoughtlessness. In practice however, the project has found that people's engagements with freedom of speech are far more varied than this framing allows for. Free speech can be experienced and sought as a matter of personal probity, as a duty in relation to others, as the effect of a commitment to a higher truth or to the wellbeing of a particular community, or as a matter of embodied skill and ethical self-formation. While classic liberal political philosophy is sometimes involved in making these arguments, they are just as often inspired and informed by other sources: religious, therapeutic or poetic. In all of these cases, the freedom of speech in question is already relational, social and cultural, and can be self-limiting in important ways.
As a result, the project concludes that many public disputes over freedom of speech would be better understood and might be partly resolved, if they were recast, not as a constantly repeated struggle between individual freedom and sociocultural constraint, but rather as tensions between different sociocultural visions of freedom of speech.
The project has produced a wide range of research publications around various aspects of freedom of speech: 26 publications have appeared to date, referencing the project, and number of further publications, including four research monographs, are currently in preparation. The main elements of the project's conceptual overview of freedom of speech have been articulated in an open access article in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology which is aimed at a broader non-academic public. This work has also been disseminated to academic and non-academic publics in a range of conferences and other settings in the UK, USA, Italy, France, Norway, Germany, Switzerland and Ukraine.
The project will result in a range of academic and public outputs. Peer-reviewed academic outputs will include 4 monographs, 2 edited volumes and a range of academic articles/book chapters. These outputs will be actively disseminated to potentially interested parties, including NGOs and IGOs, through an international conference in year 5 of the grant, and through a bespoke website.
Theoretically, this project will clear new ground on the intersection of political subjectivity, ethical practice and the study of knowledge production; methodologically, the project will transfigure anthropological ethnography through a carefully crafted comparative design; and pragmatically, it will give us new tools for reinvigorating public and intellectual debate over free speech in Europe and beyond.